Mr. Davison belonged to no poetic school. His verse was neither confessional nor formalist. He wrote a poetry of reflection: highly intelligent, deeply informed by nature, indwelling yet constantly alert to the external world. "The corner of the eye / Is where my visions lie," he wrote in his poem "Peripheral Vision."

In his poetry, as in his person, there was a worldliness to Mr. Davison, a responsiveness to life's depth. He wrote in his 1984 poem "The Vanishing Point":

Each moment wishes us to move farther on

into a sequence we can follow at most

to vanishing point. We can see no farther,

though time seems to pause and wait for us at times

and measure us and move along again.

As his fellow poet W.S. Merwin wrote in 2002, "Peter Davison, for years, has pondered with clear insight the perspectives of affection, attachment, loss, and memory, his language spare and his tone classical and deceptively quiet."

The Poetry Foundation's biographical page includes the following commentary about Davison's poetry:

Like his mentor Robert Frost, Davison employs a natural voice in his poems and speaks of common concerns. Washington Post Book World reviewer Vernon Young explains that Davison writes "a poetry of reminiscence and conservation" on such timeless subjects as youth, aging, and women. "Davison writes in what I suppose might be called the middle register of diction," Young states. "[His poems] are about illumination and endurance and sufferance, and the rhetoric that animates them is far from being merely conventional." Davison, James Finn Cotter notes in America, is "a reporter of life fashioned close to the land and the thoughts that arise from such a life." Jay Parini, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, sees in Davison's poems "a civilized wit, and this contributes to the profound sense of balance, of equilibrium." Davison, Parini concludes, "is one of our truest poets, one whose fundamental sanity and intelligence are more than welcome in a time of cultural disarray."[4]